This was not the first time a young Coke had brought their betrothed to Holkham only to receive a negative reaction: when my grandfather, the future 4th Earl of Leicester, fell in love with Marion Trefusis, my grandmother—a great beauty and a marvelous lady I remember fondly—he took her to meet his grandfather, the 2nd Earl. Pretending he could no longer hear or speak, the 2nd Earl of Leicester had taken to writing messages in his trundle bed. Taking one look at Marion, he scribbled furiously and handed the note to my grandfather. “Take her away,” it read.
On December 16, 1955, when our engagement was announced in The Times, my father promptly wrote a letter to Colin telling him, in no uncertain terms, that he was to continue calling both him and my mother Lord and Lady Leicester. Colin was rather dashed by this. I felt it a shame, especially as my mother would have been perfectly happy for Colin to call her Elizabeth.
Years later, I discovered that before the official announcement Princess Margaret had written to my mother on the subject of Colin, agreeing that she was quite right to be concerned, describing him as a “fairly decadent fellow,” before going on to offer reassurances by saying he had “shown good taste in loving Anne,” which meant she felt “he must be better already.”
This letter was never mentioned to me, and I only came across it after my mother had died. It is very telling that Princess Margaret described Colin as decadent, and typical of both her and my mother to settle on acceptance rather than to intervene too much. I can see why my mother didn’t show it to me at the time, and it is impossible now to say whether it would have made me think twice or not.
With only three months between the engagement and the wedding in April, I set to work busily making lists, arranging everything from the flowers to the music, while Carey designed the bridesmaids’ dresses. For my dress, I looked at designs from Norman Hartnell and Victor Stiebel, another top designer of the day—he went on to make Princess Margaret’s going-away outfit for her honeymoon—but it was Norman Hartnell’s that I fell for: its A-line design, made from embroidered silk, was exquisite.
My father prepared for the wedding as though I was a son, ensuring all the workers and tenant farmers I had got to know through shadowing him were included by setting up three tents in the park with a wedding cake in each, and then the main reception in the state rooms of the house.
In the days before, the surrounding area was taken over by guests, including a coachload of staff and workers from Colin’s home, Glen, in Scotland, a lot of whom had never seen the sea before. The long gallery filled with wedding presents, including a silver inkwell from the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, and a gold compact mirror from the Queen Mother. Everybody from the surrounding area came to look at them.
On April 21, 1956, we got married in St. Withburga’s Church on the Holkham estate. Once again, I stood on the marble stairs, just as I had done for my coming-out dance, but this time in my Norman Hartnell wedding dress, with the very handsome Coke diamond necklace, instead of my debutante dress made from a parachute, and I breathed it all in. This time I wasn’t rushing off to offer champagne to the workers, having not been asked to dance. This time I was the bride of Colin Tennant, the socialite of our generation, on the verge of being an independent married woman.
My father’s Rolls-Royce was polished up, and we had a chauffeur called Smith, who drove us through the park to the church. My father was rather nervous, quietly fussing over tiny things. My mother was already at the church, having made it lovely by arranging the flowers around the hanging lamps.
The service was a blur, but I remember coming out to huge crowds cheering as they saw us. A lot of people from the village and around had come to see us, and especially to catch a glimpse of Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother, who was in her furs, waving and smiling. The Queen wasn’t there as she was celebrating her birthday, something my father hadn’t realized when he had set the date.
I was pleased Princess Margaret was there even though since my coming-out dance we had seen each other only occasionally. She spent a lot of time in London, going out to nightclubs, and I didn’t: I stayed at Holkham, busy with the pottery.
It was Colin who brought us back together, rediscovering a friendship that would last a lifetime. At our wedding, however, Princess Margaret looked quite cross. She was said to hate any of her friends marrying, presumably because it would not only mean she would have fewer male friends to take her out to nightclubs but also remind her that she was still unmarried. She arrived at our wedding looking like a slightly frumpy nurse in a dark blue coat and a blue hat and gloves, oblivious then that she would marry our wedding photographer, Tony Armstrong-Jones, four years later.
Although Tony was an Eton and Cambridge man, my father considered photographers tradesmen, and rather rudely called him “Tony Snapshot” and didn’t invite him to have lunch with the wedding party. While Tony ate on his own downstairs, his future bride was the guest of honor. Tony took the most wonderful photographs, which was why we hired him—he was the very best of the day and people raved about him for good reason. But he also took an instant dislike to Colin, which became more and more apparent in later years. Incidentally, Cecil Beaton had approached my father, wanting to be the official photographer, but when my father said he had already booked Tony, Cecil was disappointed. My father decided to invite Cecil as a guest and he took some wonderful photos, then sent the bill to my father, which didn’t go down well.
Colin and I returned to the house for the reception in the Rolls-Royce and, as was the tradition, drove the long way around the park, so that we went through the village, to enable everybody to see us. Smith stalled on the hill in the village. With the car at a standstill, the crowd came looming up, peering in through the windows. I felt very on show and started to feel anxious, saying, “Smith, please hurry. Can’t you get the car going again? It’s so embarrassing sitting here.” He was very flustered but eventually he got the car started and off we went.
The guests were greeted, the cakes were cut, the speeches made in all three tents and then the state rooms. Then the photographs were taken, all with the backdrop of a perfect sunny day. I enjoyed myself, although as the time ticked past, I began to feel distracted. I imagine every bride catches herself in a surreal moment at some point during her wedding day. For me it was the anxious anticipation of the wedding night that played on my mind, especially when it was time for Colin and me to leave Holkham. Most brides of my background, in those days, were virgins. And apart from a broken heart, courtesy of Johnnie Althorp, I was totally inexperienced when it came to love affairs.
My mother had told me about sex. I was eleven and about to leave home to go to boarding school. I hadn’t yet started my periods, so my mother covered that too. She began talking about Biscuit, our dog: “You know how we shut Biscuit up when she has blood coming out of her bottom? Well, that is what will happen to you soon.” And then she said, “Later on, when you’re grown-up and get married, do you remember Daddy’s Labrador getting on top of Biscuit? Well, that’s what happens when you get married and have sex, except you will probably be lying down in a bed.” I was never told anything else.
As the afternoon turned into early evening, I went up to my mother’s bedroom to change out of my wedding dress and into a blue silk coat, hat, and gloves. It was at this point that a wave of horror hit me: I realized I was about to leave not only the house but my life as I knew it. My mother wasn’t surprised when I broke down. “I thought this might happen,” she said. “This is the beginning of a whole new life.” She told me she understood the weight I felt and that she had been in that position herself when she was only nineteen, much younger than my twenty-three years. When I eventually reappeared, Colin saw my red eyes and I think it worried him because the journey from Holkham to the little airfield was strained.
From the airfield, a small private plane took us to Croydon, for our passports to be checked, and then on we went to Paris, the first stop on what was supposed to be a six-month honeymoon.
By the time we got to the Hôtel Lotti, right next to the Arc de Triomphe, it was the middle of the night and I was exhausted, ready to go to bed immediately. But not Colin. On seeing that our room contained two single beds, he became absolutely furious.
Off he went to the front desk, where the tiny night porter got quite a shock as this imposing Englishman flailed his arms, his voice raised to the roof, not caring that he was waking up all the guests. The porter soon realized that the only prospect of calming him down was for him and Colin to haul a double mattress from the basement all the way up four or five flights of stairs. Colin shouted all the way as the hotel’s other guests came out into the corridors to see what all the commotion was about. Finally, over the top of the twin beds was flopped a dirty, sagging double mattress. And underneath it all, somewhere, lay the exhausted Frenchman.
And there I was, waiting silently, clutching my closed silk handbag with both hands, wondering what would happen next. To my surprise, Colin climbed onto the bed and was snoring within minutes. I lay there bewildered. Colin had already broken his promise—only hours after we had left the church, I had witnessed his first meltdown of our married life.
Although I didn’t experience the wedding night, it caught up with me in the morning and our first attempt at sex was not as enjoyable as I had hoped it to be. It was awkward, painful, and certainly not the night of passion I had been hoping for. Colin was obviously dissatisfied, which made me feel terribly awkward. I knew he had been very promiscuous, often visiting Mrs. Fetherstonhaugh, who ran one of the “poshest brothels” in London, where the “ladies” were quite often vicars’ wives, who would work part-time shifts for pocket money, returning to their civilized lives in the evenings.
I suppose he had never been to bed with a virgin before, but rather than teaching me, he was critical and, instead of easing me into the physical side of marriage, he had an alternative plan. “I’m taking you out tonight for a surprise,” he said, after a slightly uncomfortable day at the Louvre. Imagining he was whisking me off to the Ritz, or maybe the Palace or Le Grand Véfour, I put on my best dress and felt excited, but as we drove through central Paris and out the other side, I began to get nervous.
The day before I had been in my wedding dress, exchanging vows in front of the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, and hundreds of other people, and now I was in a car being driven through the seedy outskirts of Paris, getting further and further away from what I had hoped and expected. What was even more disconcerting was that for the whole journey Colin refused to tell me anything. “It’s a surprise,” was the only thing he said.
The destination was nothing short of appalling—a filthy, run-down hotel, with a funny smell. After climbing some stairs, we entered a room and sat down in a pair of red velvet, winged-back chairs. Then I was presented with Colin’s “surprise”: two strangers, naked, in front of us, having sex.
I had been conservatively brought up. I was wearing a demure silk dress. This was the first day of my honeymoon and this was the surprise. Why he thought it was a good idea, why he thought I would like it, I can’t tell you to this day. We sat next to each other but, thankfully, out of sight because of the wingback chairs. I stuck the back of my head to the chair, sitting bolt upright, wincing and keeping my eyes closed, dreading what Colin might be doing next to me.
The intertwined pasty bodies of the French couple squelching into each other on the bed was the most unattractive thing you could possibly imagine. I found it perfectly disgusting. Every now and then they asked us if we would like to join in. So, I found myself saying politely, “That’s very kind of you, but no thank you.” They carried on, oblivious, and once they had finished, they got up and left the room. Colin and I were still sitting in the wingback chairs. We hadn’t exchanged a word. I thought: This honeymoon is going to continue for six months. Six months. How am I going to cope?
From Paris, we boarded the Queen Mary to New York. During the first night on board, Colin lost his temper again, shouting and screaming in a way I would become used to but which, at the time, was still a huge shock. This time it was my fault. My father, a stickler for fresh air, had always insisted I slept with the windows open, so as soon as we arrived in our cabin I opened the little round porthole. Later that night, once we were on the high seas, a huge wave crashed against the ship, the water coming through the porthole, completely soaking us and the cabin. Colin was incandescent, accusing me of having done it on purpose. Then he got a cold, which meant he wouldn’t let me forget about the wave through the porthole until he was better. With Colin bedbound, I spent the days away from him, which, by this time, was quite a relief, exploring what the Queen Mary’s cinema, shops, and places to eat had to offer. I could enjoy, too, just sitting and people-watching as dozens of very old ladies dripping with jewels were romanced by gigolos.
By the time we got to New York, Colin had recovered, and we went straight on to Cuba, which was thick with political unrest. Fidel Castro’s popularity was rising, but at that time President Batista was still in charge. Even though the hotel we were staying in wasn’t fully built, and the island was riddled with mosquitoes, the honeymoon was improving by then. There hadn’t been any more nasty surprises, and Colin and I were getting on well together. He seemed to be settling down a bit, but everything changed when he took me to a cock fight.
Apparently cock fights are, or at least were then, a major part of social life in Cuba. We sat among the crowd, huddled round a clear circular area, in a dark room, dimly lit by hanging naked bulbs. In the clearing, there were two cockerels and a few men. I didn’t feel very relaxed or excited: cock fighting was not my idea of fun and the atmosphere was rather shifty. Conscious of the experiences in Paris, I wondered, with imposing dread, whether this would simply add to the budding collection. I watched uncomfortably as the men cruelly set about provoking the cockerels—pulling their feathers, shouting at them, making them puff up their chests in defense. Once they had cajoled them enough, they let the cockerels go, throwing them towards each other, so the fight would commence.
Well, that’s what normally happened. However, on this occasion, one of the cockerels, instead of confronting the other, immediately flew up into the air and made a beeline for me. I was the only fair-haired person in the room, and I think it must have mistaken my blonde hair for straw because, before I knew it, I had a cockerel sitting on my head with its spurs digging into my scalp, my blood dripping down the side of my face. Colin’s response was to be absolutely furious, shouting at me that I had ruined the cock fight and ruined all the bets that had been placed. Soon, the entire crowd was shouting at me, leaving me feeling as bewildered as the cockerel, which continued to cling to my head.
I was left shell-shocked and things stayed tense, the honeymoon continuing to rack up uncomfortable situations. On the very long train journey to Yellowstone, Wyoming, Colin lost his temper once more, this time over a card game. It wasn’t one of those grand trains like the Orient Express so there wasn’t a lot to do on it. We spent most of our time in our cabin, which was a squeeze even with Colin on a chair and me on the bunk, which could be pushed up against the wall by a lever to make more room. We both enjoyed playing cards, but there was always a major problem: Colin didn’t like losing. This time, I kept getting good cards, all of them better than his. I prayed that I would pick up bad ones, but it wasn’t to be. I was winning and could sense Colin’s mood changing. Suddenly he exploded, stood up in a rage and deliberately flipped the lever switch. The bed I was on shut like a trap. I was squashed, my arms and legs sticking out, my head bolstered against the wall. Fortunately, and by this time perhaps surprisingly after the number of shocks he’d given me, Colin realized I was hurt. He was apologetic and relatively sympathetic, and rushed off to get help.
Fortunately, Yellowstone marked the end of our honeymoon and the end of my baptism of fire. It was cut short when I began to feel sick because I was pregnant. This was some relief. As far as I was concerned the honeymoon had gone on quite long e
nough and I was very pleased to be going home. As we left Yellowstone, I experienced the great sinking feeling that I was now going back to face the rest of my married life, almost certainly replete with uncomfortable situations.
It had all started in Paris, a place I have never quite been able to relax in since. The next time Colin and I went, he took me to a stage show of a man making love to a donkey.
CHAPTER SIX
Absolutely Furious
A MAN OF extremes, Colin is hard to explain and was even harder to understand. One thing is for certain, though: he was never boring. He had a great many stories to tell, loved throwing parties, and, when it came to clothes, had all sorts of brightly colored ensembles. A firm favorite was a suit made from different tartans, which he called “the gathering of the clans.” He’d often change outfits several times in one evening, rather disruptively. On one occasion, when we were having lunch with our friend Patrick Plunket, Colin was dressed head to toe in PVC and, although I could see him getting hotter and hotter, he refused to take off the jacket, and a few minutes later he fainted. This simply added to the theatrics of the outing, as far as he was concerned. He also liked attracting attention, wanting to shock people. On flights, he would change outfits in the aisle, apparently oblivious to the sensibilities of the passengers around him, and he had no qualms about making a scene in public. As with all marriages, I married all of my husband. Colin could be charming, angry, endearing, hilariously funny, manipulative, vulnerable, intelligent, spoiled, insightful, and fun. I got to know the good parts and the bad.
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